Monday, September 08, 2008

Proposal: The Big Red Buttom

A Calls for Judgment is never out of order and may always be posted, regardless of what any other rule says.

Granted someone could put in a rule that says “a CfJ may never be posted, regardless of what any other rule says, but then there would be a disagreement and we would need to post a CfJ to resolve it. Granted there are other ways of totally breaking the game, so maybe we could just have a “big red button” rule that resets the game to a ruleset we know isn’t broken, but I’m afraid people would try and use that way too often. Considering once is too often.

Comments

For what it’s worth, attempts to bulletproof the core ruleset against malicious attack are never going to work, so long as those rules are themselves in any way mutable. Whatever specific countermeasure you install, the future exploiter can just remove that countermeasure as part of whatever proposal they’re forcing through (eg. “a CfJ may never be posted, and the last sentence of the CfJ rule is removed”).

The “big red button” is already there in the metagame, the same way that it’s there when you knock a chessboard over. If the ruleset exploded spectacularly, or froze solid, we would just agree to stop playing that particular game, and play a new version of BlogNomic that had a very similar (but working) ruleset.

"Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed."